Behold, beautiful Eagle Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Allen, Texas. It cost $60 million to build and has proudly hosted high school football ($60 million worth of high school football) for an astonishing 18 MONTHS. Now it’s being closed. Did everybody get their money’s worth?

Eagle Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Allen will be closed until at least June for an examination of “extensive cracking” in the concrete of the stadium’s concourse, the district said in a statement Thursday. The closure will likely affect home games at the stadium this fall, the district said.

Eagle Stadium, which seats 18,000 people and sports a 38-foot-wide video board, will be closed indefinitely due to extensive cracking in Allen, Texas.
Ben Pogue of Pogue Construction, which built the stadium, told reporters that the cracks range from a quarter-inch to three-quarters of an inch wide.

“There are concerns surrounding the stadium, but we have been — for a long time — part of the solution,” Pogue said, according to the Dallas Morning News. “I’m optimistic that we’re going to have a quick resolve to this that will not affect the football season that’s coming up.”

There you have it, folks, a community paid $60 million to build a high school football stadium and it had to be shut down in under two years because none of that $60 million was put toward MAKING THE BUILDING STAND UP or hiring someone who could say “hey, don’t use garbage concrete or it’ll probably collapse and kill everyone.” It’s especially maddening to me as a kid who went to high school and played football on a $60 field that was essentially a rectangular mudpit with some bleachers in the middle of an old people jogging track.

Looking on the bright side, this is probably the best-case scenario for a “football stadium closed because of crack” headline.

“Our No. 1 priority must always be the safety of our students, staff and community,” Louise Master, Allen’s ISD board president, said in a release.

If I had to guess (which of course you’re making me), I’d say the problem is with the design or uneven ground compaction. The concrete is tested on-site with a slump test and tested in cylinders at an off-site facility to measure the compression strength.

There’s a man who knows the difference between concrete and cement. The soil in North Texas is notoriously expansive/contractive based on humidity (junky clay that’s good for nothing except cotton). They’ll get it figured out.

And that’s chump change when you realize Arlington Tx built a 1 billion dollar stadium that was broke from the beginning because Jerry Jones thought it would be a good idea for the field to run East-West.

The brilliant white (R) public servants in Meridian Ms have big ideas too. They want to spent $40M on entertainment complex. In a town the budget is 60M spent only $960M just 16 yrs alone and MERIDIAN LOOKS LIKE 3rd WORLD WAR ZONE FOR ONLY $960 MILLION paid for by poor folk making slave wages like its 1854 again and all for the brilliant hite (R) public ervant BECAME GD MILLIONAIRES! My family here built great since 1854. Only took 2 brilliant white (R) mayors since 1993 to run in dirt look like 3rd world war zone for only $960M poorest taxpayers expense? Gotta love the brilliant white (R) conservative christians BIG IDEAS they are STARVING and denying DECENT EDUCATION for our most precious resources TO HAVE NO FUTURE!